Save time, not money

We humans are inherently flawed when it comes to money. If it’s a new iPhone or a pair of sunglasses, we’ll dish out $500 in a heartbeat. But if you ask $40 for a year of managed WordPress hosting, a lot of people will look at you like you’ve just insulted their grandma’s crochet skills.

Jimmy Hoffa told me the same thing back in the day. Just out of curiosity, what’s your favorite NFL team?

WordPress is fantastic because you can find so much for free, but at the same time it spoiled us. We expect fully functional themes and plugins to be free, with stellar support that has nothing better to do than to solve our every inane issue.

I do understand your side of business but still the wp market needs #opensource solution and not services that cost you more money
― An actual tweet to a WordPress SaaS with a functional free tier

It’s bad for the developers because they need to pay the bills. And it’s bad for you, because you’re sabotaging yourself with this mindset.

Why time and not money?

TL;DR answer: time is finite, money isn’t.

Let’s say you’re making $20/hr as a WordPress developer. You occasionally need to migrate a website for a client. You’ve got 3 options:

Do it manually in an hour

Use a quirky free migration plugin (instant, 50% success rate, have to do it manually if it fails)

By focusing on lowering the cost, you’re creating more work for yourself. You’re losing time that you can spend elsewhere, and it’s costing you a lot more in the long run.

This problem is evident in the WordPress maintenance market. Our estimate shows that almost 90% of WordPress professionals still manage websites manually, even though it’s 21st century and the civilization has gotten to the point where we have things like Amazon Dash and Roomba.

Ultimately, these people either give up on maintenance service because it’s not cost-effective, or they stagnate by letting 10 clients eat up all of their time, effectively preventing them from getting new clients. They literally work themselves into a dead end because they cling to every cent possible.

Value your time

You have a finite amount of time in this world. Money can come and go, but time is constantly being depleted. If you want money, spend as less time as possible to obtain it. Automate and delegate as much as it makes sense.

Do the math

The migration table above was pretty straightforward, unlike most things in life. But in most cases you can do a bit of research, learn all the variables and make the right call.

So if a premium theme costs twice as much as its competitors but everyone’s leaving glowing comments about the clean code and super helpful support, it’s probably worth a shot: if they save you just one hour of your time, you’ve gotten your investment back.

Free is often not free in WordPress

Consider the setup effort and cost. Consider support and security; how much time you’ll spend fixing all those abandoned lines of code. Consider the client trust you’ll lose if you cut corners and make the calls solely on the price point.

If nothing above strikes a cord, I’ll leave this as your key takeaway:

Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.
― Anthony G. Oettinger

Nemanja Aleksic

Head of Growth at ManageWP. Marketing Manager at GoDaddy. WordCamp Belgrade organizer. But first and foremost, a father, a husband and a puck stopper.

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5Comments

Alex Sirota

There is one more thing that is valuable to a WordPress developer when they do thing professionally: credibility. When you are capable and able to solve issues consistently and with very little interruption to your process, you get bonus points with your customers. The ability to execute quickly without failure sets you apart from all the others who have failed before you. Customers are used to poor service from large brands, and if you differentiate with high quality solutions that have support you will win too.

Paying for value is not new. What is new is somehow giving stuff away for free and equating that with things that cost money. Free is a marketing gimmick. There ain’t no such thing as free lunch.

Sherry Bradford

Thank you! This is a terrific little article and the closing quote is absolutely marvelous. I’m actually saving a link to this page to share with the next friend who asks if I will build them a WordPress site for their budding business because “It’s just WordPress and that’s free, right?” 🙂

CHAFF

This, totally this!!!

I’ll buy a commercial plugin or over most free ones if:
– it appears that it has decent support.
– it costs enough or has enough sales that I feel it will be around. I’ve had at least one commercial theme get dropped. 🙁

There are few interesting plugin vendors that are full OSS, but offer paid support. That seems to be a nice blend.

gmourelatos

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